Walter Isaacson on the sentence that built a country

So Walter, I want to ask you about your most recent book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, which is you claim, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Why is that the greatest sentence ever written?

It becomes a forcing mechanism for a new type of nation on earth.

Up until then, most nations were either ruled because of the divine right of kings or the sword of conquerors.

But the notion that, as Lincoln said, you could have a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that under the social contract of that nation, there was an equality of rights, That created a new form of government, but obviously when they wrote it, it was not true about the nation they had just formed.

All were not equal rights.

You had one fifth of the people in the colonies were enslaved.

You had women who didn't have the right to vote.

As I say, it becomes not a description of America, but a mission statement, an aspiration statement that forces, becomes a forcing mechanism.

When Lincoln said that about a nation conceived in liberty, it was four score and seven years after they wrote it.

And it wasn't just that he was making a speech at Gettysburg.

He was consecrating a cemetery in which 7,058 young people were buried because they had tried to make that sentence more true.

Likewise, the Seneca Falls Declaration giving rights to women, they invoke the sentence.

Likewise, Martin Luther King invokes a sentence.

Lyndon Johnson invokes it when he signs the Civil Rights Act.

I think it's a great sentence not because it was correct, but because it pushed us to be more perfect, more correct.

Right, it was the antecedent for a lot of changes that happened later because of the ideals it espoused.

Yes, in this country and in this world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I want to ask about that contradiction you mentioned.

So as you said, I think it was many of the founders enslaved people.

I think 43 of the 56 signers enslaved people.

And what I found interesting about your book, and I knew this before, but you really made it very clear, was that many of them actually deplored slavery in their private writing but of course, enslaved people themselves and publicly didn't fight against it.

So at some level, they knew it was wrong, but they lacked moral courage, as all of us do.